Computer Engineering Commons^™

Text-To-Speech Animation: Generating Visuals Based On Phonetic Spelling, Colin Tomcak

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Speech is a complex field, and remarkably difficult to master. There exist many groups who could use more tools to help improve their pronunciation of English words. The goal of this project was to create a text-to-speech animation program as an addition to our group capstone, Pronunciation Pal. Pronunciation Pal is a web-based application meant to assist those who are deaf or hard of hearing in improving their pronunciation, likely as an addition to therapy with a speech pathologist. This application uses tools like diagrams and references to help users better understand how to pronounce a word. The goal of …

Gamification Of Speech Therapy With Pronunciation Pal, Parker Zbylut

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

This capstone report examines the theory and implementation behind applying game design principles to educational applications, and explores their implementation in an educational game through the Pronunciation Pal application. The gamification of learning tools aims to increase learners' engagement and attentiveness with a subject by restructuring content using game design principles of challenges, rewards and feedback. Feedback can be delivered via visuals and/or sounds, as well as regular indicators of player progress and accomplishment. In addition, a successful game implementation establishes challenges to facilitate a player's intrinsic desire to continue playing and improving at the skills presented by the game. …

Love Machina, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Love Machina (2024), directed by Peter Sillen.

Protecting The Infrastructure Of Michigan: Analyzing And Understanding Internet Infrastructure, Samuel Blaser, Travis Munyer, Damian Ramirez, Lester Juarez, Jackson Servant

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The Michigan Army National Guard DCOE is hoping to increase their understanding of the physical, electrical, protocol, and logical topography of internet service. In order to understand the infrastructure of the internet, information must be collected on its pieces. By studying, describing, and illustrating the infrastructure of the global internet we can develop hardening tactics, improve user training, and develop contingency plans in the case of an attack. The research is focused on where data lives, locating data centers in the region, identifying global infrastructure and who owns it, and potential for hardening. An interactive map has been created in …

Eco: A Sustainability Education Chatbot, Joey Gruber

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

There is a lack of access to information about sustainability from what the climate crisis is to how to recycle properly. For both sustainability-informed and uninformed individuals, learning new information about sustainability and reducing their waste in a way that compliments their lifestyle is time-consuming, requires strategic skills, and can cost them money. ECO is an audio and text-based chatbot that teaches users to be more environmentally conscious through waste reduction.

Using Deep Neural Network And Transformers To Extract Graphene Compounds And Properties, Ayman Ibn Jaman

Computer Science Graduate Research Workshop

No abstract provided.

Synthesizer Parameter Approximation By Deep Learning, Daniel Faronbi, Alisa Gilmore

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Synthesizers have been an essential tool for composers of any style of music including computer generated sound. They allow for an expansion in timbral variety to the orchestration of a piece of music or sound scape. Sound designers are trained to be able to recreate a timbre in their head using a synthesizer. This works well for simple sounds but becomes more difficult as the number of parameters required to produce a specific timbre increase. The goal of this research project is to formulate a method for synthesizers to approximate a timbre given an input audio sample using deep learning. …

Heterogeneous Resources Cost-Aware Geo-Distributed Data Analytics, Minmin Zhang

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Many popular cloud service providers deploy tens of data centers (DCs) around the world to reduce user-perceived latency for better user experiences, in which a large amount of data is generated and stored in a geo-distributed manner. Geo-distributed Data Analytics (GDA) has gained great popularity in meeting the growing demand to mine meaningful and timely knowledge from such highly dispersed data. Since GDA systems require a large data migration between DCs via a wide area network (WAN), many existing works invested significant effort to optimize data transfer strategies to efficiently use limited WAN by considering the network pricing policies on …

Granny Pod Virtual Assistant, David Connolly, Bing Chen

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Dr. Chen is working on a sustainable small house (SSH) project, sometimes called the “Granny Pod”. Regulations will soon allow homeowners to house their parents on their property, which can be an opportunity live independently in a cheap, sustainable, and convenient alternative to a retirement community. To help achieve this vision, a Virtual Assistant system for the SSH was developed. The system uses a Google Home or Amazon Echo to respond to the voice command “Hey Google (or Alexa), I need help” by contacting the nearby homeowner or caretaker. It alerts the resident who is at the door when the …

Performance Analysis Of Voting Algorithms In Wireless Sensor Networks, Aditi Mishra

Computer Science Graduate Research Workshop

No abstract provided.

Consensus-Based Robotic Formation Control, Satish Reddy Modugu

Computer Science Graduate Research Workshop

No abstract provided.

Simulator For Qubit Measurement Using Augmented Reality, Sai Pradeep Koneti

Computer Science Graduate Research Workshop

No abstract provided.

An Application Of Artificial General Intelligence In Board Games, Nathan Skalka

Computer Science Graduate Research Workshop

No abstract provided.

A Correlation Network Model For Managing Safety And Performance Issues In Bridges And Civil Infrastructures, Prasad Chetti

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Many recent studies have shown that a large percentage of bridges in many parts of the world have low safety rating. National Bridge Inventory (NBI) database contains the information of more than 600,000 bridges, where each bridge has 116 parameters. Current safety inspections require bridge inspectors to manually inspect each bridge every few years. Manpower and budget constraints limit such approach from inspecting the bridges more frequently. Clearly, more efficient approaches need to be developed to improve the process of bridge inspection and increase the overall safety of bridges and civil infrastructures. In this study, we propose a Correlation Network …

A Shared-Memory Algorithm For Updating Single-Source Shortest Paths In Large Weighted Dynamic Networks, Sriram Srinivasan

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

In the last decade growth of social media, increased the interest of network algorithms for analyzing large-scale complex systems. The networks are highly unstructured and exhibit poor locality, which has been a challenge for developing scalable parallel algorithms. The state-of-the-art network algorithms such as Prim's algorithm for Minimum Spanning Tree, Dijkstra's algorithm for Single Source Shortest Path and ISPAN algorithm for detecting strongly connected components are designed and optimized for static networks. The networks which change with time i.e. the dynamic networks such as social networks, the above-mentioned approaches can only be utilized if they are recomputed from scratch each …

Keep It Simple, Keep It Safe - Research On The Impacts Of Increasing Complexity Of Modern Enterprise Applications, Shawn Ware, David Phillips

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

As the Cybersecurity program within UNO continues to adapt to the ever-changing world of information systems and information security, the Cybersecurity Capstone has recently become an active, community-involvement project, where real-world organizations can receive valuable, useful research and information from students on their way towards a degree. This presentation encompasses two such projects from the Cybersecurity Capstone, looking at how modern, more complex systems can often increase system vulnerability.

Quantifying Static And Dynamic Stability Using Mobile Sensors, Mason Schleu

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Quantifying Static and Dynamic Stability Using Mobile Sensors

Balance disorders burden over 35% of Americans, causing substantial impact on quality of life due to psychological and physical hardships associated with poor balance. Balance disorder can affect all individuals, and range in seriousness from slight dizziness to the inability to safely walk from place to place. Elderly adults are most susceptible to the dangers of poor balance, where injuries from falling are a prevalent and grave concern. Balance disorders are often assessed only after the event of a fall or injury, warranting the need for a readily available, at home balance …

Anchored Discussion: Development Of A Tool For Creativity In Online Collaboration, Georg J.P. Link, Dominik Siemon, Gert-Jan De Vreede, Susanne Robra-Bissantz

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Open innovation and crowdsourcing rely on online collaboration tools to enable dispersed people to collaborate on creative ideas. Research shows that creativity in online groups is significantly influenced by the interaction between group members. In this paper, we demonstrate how theory can be effectively used to design and evaluate a tool for creative online collaboration. Specifically, we use the body of knowledge on creativity support systems to inform the development of a tool to support anchored discussions. Anchored discussions represent a new mode for creative interaction. In anchored discussion every comment is tied to some aspect of an idea. We …